The Crossroads at Cold Harbor

By late spring 1864, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was relentlessly pursuing his advance on the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va. With his recent appointment as commander of the Union armies, Grant had brought a new approach to the war – one of absolute and brutal attrition. Knowing that he could replace as many men as he lost, even as the rebel army suffered from a desperate shortage of manpower, he had bulldozed his way across Virginia in what was named the Overland Campaign, throwing tens of thousands of men against the Confederate wall.

At the end of May, after the bloody but inconclusive confrontations of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, the two armies came together at an obscure crossroads just a few miles outside Richmond. Described as nothing more than “a wide spot in a lonely, dusty road,” it had been named Cold Harbor – after a run-down shelter that supposedly offered travelers a place to sleep but no hot meals.

Since the beginning of the war, the Union’s Army of the Potomac had been cursed with leaders who had failed them, often at a terrific cost in lives, morale and reputation. They had been wasted to no good purpose, pulled back when they might have gained victories, thinned and demoralized beyond all reason. One brigadier general lamented, “I had regulars … before I went into the battle of Gettysburg. I left half of them there, and buried the rest in the Wilderness.” Their current commander, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, had been widely castigated for allowing Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to withdraw across the Potomac after Gettysburg, and now he was chafing under Grant’s leadership as the two moved the army southward. After constant combat, forced marches and little sleep, everyone was exhausted and nerves were raw. The level of communication between Grant and Meade, and Meade and his subordinates, was poor, and tempers were short. By the time the army reached Cold Harbor, there were too many broken links in the chain of command, too many used-up men.

The rebel forces, their backs to the Chickahominy River, had dug a series of trenches from which to repulse the advancing Yankees, and on June 2, Meade prepared to attack the rebel works. Uncharacteristically, Grant ordered a postponement until the following day, to give his exhausted soldiers a much needed respite. It proved a costly mistake. By delaying his offensive a full day, he gave Lee the opportunity to extend and reinforce his defenses, with rifle pits and trenches seven feet deep, and in places, three tiers deep. In believing that Lee was as good as “whipped,” Grant had badly misread the strength and resolve of his enemy, and his soldiers – the men of the VI and XVIII Corps of infantry – would pay dearly for his overconfidence.

Unbelievably, despite having been given orders – and an extra day – to prepare before engaging Lee’s army, the Union corps commanders had conducted practically no reconnaissance of the seven-mile front that stretched from Bethesda Church to the Chickahominy. As a result, their troops would be charging blind. When they received their orders early on the morning of June 3, the soldiers did not panic or run; many of them simply wrote their names and addresses on slips of paper, and pinned the notes to the inside of their blouses, so that their bodies could be identified for burial.

Their fatalism proved amply justified. The attack began in mist and fog, at 4:30 a.m. As they charged, all the Yankees could see before them was freshly turned earth, behind which were the entrenched rifle pits of thousands of waiting rebels. During the first crucial hour of the main attack, the Southern guns poured volley after volley of enfilading fire into the hapless federals. They died in rows, in waves; as many as 7,000 Union soldiers fell in that terrible hour, most in the first 10 minutes. The field was soon littered with Union dead and wounded.

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A burial party at Cold HarborCredit Library of Congress

Throughout the morning, attacks failed all along the front, though the Yankees outnumbered Lee’s army nearly two to one. Just past noon, Grant issued an order suspending the assault. When he ordered another attack later in the day, many units simply refused. Said one soldier, “The army to a man refused to obey the order, presumably from General Grant, to renew the assault. I heard the order given, and I saw it disobeyed.” Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, commanding XVIII Corps, called the order a “wanton waste of life,” and ignored his commander’s order as well – and was never punished for it.

As darkness obscured the field, Grant – rarely one to complain or rethink his decisions – reportedly told his staff, ‘I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered. I regarded it as a stern necessity, and believed it would bring compensating results; but, as it has proved, no advantages have been gained sufficient to justify the heavy losses suffered.” Typically, Grant did not dwell on what could not be undone. For nine more days, the two armies skirmished, to no great effect.

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Two days after the ill-fated charge, Grant wrote to Lee asking for a truce, so that both sides could retrieve their casualties; Lee responded that he had none. On June 7, Grant revised his request, asking to be allowed to gather in his wounded; Lee complied, granting a two-hour respite. By this time, after lying on the field for four days under a scorching sun, most of the wounded who had not crawled or been carried back to their lines had perished.

On June 12, Grant led his army quietly away, leaving the tragedy of Cold Harbor behind him. In the words of one historian, “In a war that had seen more than its share of slaughter, Cold Harbor set a new and terrible standard.” It was arguably Grant’s worst defeat of the war. He crossed the James River, and pressed on to Petersburg, to destroy the railroads that fed Richmond, and again confront Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The debacle at Cold Harbor haunted Grant for the rest of his life. He wrote in his memoirs, “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made….[N]o advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.”

At the Cold Harbor crossroads, Lee had won what the rebels considered the easiest victory of the war. It would be his last. For the 10 months remaining in the conflict, Grant would never again underestimate his opponent.

Cold Harbor Today:

“We get at least one visitor a day asking after a relative who fought in the battle,” said Bob Krick, a National Park Service historian at Cold Harbor. True to his words, within the hour, a tall Georgian walks into the visitor’s center looking for information on a great-grandfather who had been stabbed in the neck during the June 3 charge.

The park at Cold Harbor, one of 11 sites in the Richmond National Battlefield Park system, is deceptively small, containing only 280 acres of the original line. Most visitors come asking to see the single field where the bloody June attack took place, unaware that separate actions took place along much of that seven-mile front – most of which is now on private land.

The site offers some of the best surviving examples of Civil War trench work, both Northern and Southern. Considering they were dug 146 years ago, and used for less than two weeks, many of the rebel trenches are still surprisingly deep, and would still require rifle steps to see over the top. The Yankee trenches, while shallower, lie in as many as a dozen rows. Here, in anticipation of the trench warfare of World War I, the soldiers dug in and faced the enemy across what was once open ground, now tree-filled fields. Some of the trenches were “turned” – taken by the federals, and dug out on the opposite side to face the foe.

It is impossible to get a true sense of a battle line that stretched some seven miles across broken terrain. Nonetheless, gazing across a killing field while standing alongside those rows of deadly trenches, the years fade, and the visitor still gets a knot in the stomach.

Ron Soodalter is the author of “Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader” and a co-author of “The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today.” He is a frequent contributor to America’s Civil War magazine, and has written several features for Civil War Times and Military History.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.